As I watched Beyoncé last night, a confident, non-waify, black woman, owning her magnificence, owning her body, owning her talent and skill, owning her sensuality, owning her sexuality, unabashed, unapologetic and unashamed and unafraid I knew.

I knew that within hours, complaints about her being too much, too sexy, too scandalous would start from all the quarters who live in terror of a self-possessed woman of color being given approval in our society.

It didn’t even take that long. The first critique of her allegedly offensive “hypersexuality” rolled across my screen before the Superdome blackout.

Just once I’d like the racists and misogynists (and racist misogynysts) to prove me wrong. Just once.

So!

thecurvature:

I blogged about the story here on Christmas Eve in which a man — a white dude, unsurprisingly — set his house on fire, waited for firefighters to show up, and shot them all, killing two.

It’s unsurprisingly enormous local news, and it’s my understanding that it has at least marginally made national news, as well. Seven houses burned down, 5 people were shot, and 3 were murdered, including his sister, with 6 victims in total. The dude who did this, who killed himself, of course, was a total shitbag. No one seems to care very much about his sister, who he also murdered, but they are broken up about the firefighters. Who, I do agree, deserve to be broken up about — they were there to help somebody; indeed, they were volunteers.

Anyway, a woman was just arrested in connection with the case. A woman who appears to be a woman of color.

A former neighbor, she supposedly bought the guns for the guy under false pretenses over 2 years ago. They found out because he wrote about it in his suicide note. Apparently, some additional evidence backs up his assertion.

Now, look. I am in no way suggesting that committing a federal offense by lying about who is going to be the owner of some high-powered weapons upon purchasing them is a good thing to do, or a right thing to do, or a thing that I support.

I’m just saying that we live in a society where guns are made so freely available and so cavalierly treated and considered more of a god-given right than food or shelter that lying about who you’re buying some guns for is seen about on par with fraudulently giving a friend your employee discount.

And what I’m saying is that everybody really needs somebody to blame. And the guy who deserves the blame, he’s dead.

So what we have here is a white dude who once killed his grandmother with a fucking hammer.

Who murdered his own sister.

Who set fire to his own house, completely destroying 7homes and otherwise damaging god knows how many.

Who set a trap for volunteer firefighters responding to an emergency on the early morning hours of Christmas Eve and tried to kill them all, succeeding in a couple of cases.

Who then went on the run for hours, preventing firefighters from fighting the fire that was currently destroying people’s homes.

And who also, before killing himself, wrote a note that said “I’m an asshole white dude who just killed some of your white dude heroes, and you’re all going to be really fucking pissed. I’m too much of a coward to deal with it.

But here’s a woman of color you can blame for buying me something you can pick up at Walmart.”

And instead of looking at that and saying “No, we are not going to do this.”

We’ve apparently instead decided “Okay, let’s run with that.”

And in the exceedingly rare instance that somebody actually has to pay for any of these mass shootings perpetuated almost exclusively by white men, it’s going to be a woman of color tied to the stake. Even though she didn’t fire a single shot.

avatarsnowy:

reminder that the phrase “first world problems” is gross and you should avoid using it at all costs

“I don’t see color!”

starvedforjustice:

What white people think that means:

• I can’t be racist
• My intentions matter
• PoC are too sensitive
• because I don’t see color it must mean that racism is over
• I’m such an enlightened person
• You’re not as enlightened as me for being offended at my racist jokes
• Now I can appropriate any culture I want because WE ALL BLEED RED

What it actually means:

• You’re probably incredibly racist
• You’re worse at noticing racist micro aggressions
• You entirely ignore racist macro aggressions
• You participate in cultural appropriation, and the erasure of PoC who’s culture means more to them than fashion trends
• You disrespect people’s cultural boundaries and erase their identities in your desire to “not see color”
• You’re not enlightened, just racist
•  Your intentions have never, and will never matter
• Racism isn’t an event, it can’t just end when you think it should
• Your racist jokes aren’t cool and edgy, they’re just racist
• We’re not “sensitive”, you’re just racist

The media lies.

bankuei:

dionthesocialist:

• They keep referring to Michael Laney as a “suspect,” when it reality, the only thing suspect about him is that he was riding a red scooter.
• They’re simultaneously saying Michael Laney had his hands behind his back and that he was reaching for an officer’s gun (or his gun), which is physically impossible if your hands are behind your back.
• Notice how all the media reports say that the officers thought Laney was reaching for a gun, but no one has mentioned whether or not he actually had a gun. You know why? Because he didn’t fucking have a gun. If he had one, that shit would be in the goddamn headline. 
• Most of the media is conveniently leaving out the whole part where after the cop shot Michael, the other cop yelled to him “What have you done?” They fucking knew right then they had used excessive force.
• The media is bringing up Michael’s felony record for one reason: so that the police officers can be justified in murdering him.
• The goddamn piece of shit police chief had the nerve to say “these officers feared for their lives.” Fuck you. Michael was running to his mother’s house. He feared for his life. You did not fear for your fucking life when you had him handcuffed, when you shot an unarmed, handcuffed man in the head. 
• Then, he had the nerve to say “the alternative is we could be talking about two dead cops right now.” This… this is what they think about us. The police chief of the Charlotte Mecklenberg Police Department has literally said “Yeah, a black man’s dead, but it’s way better than the alternative: a white cop being dead.”

Of course, the question is, how could dead police be an alternative when he didn’t have a gun, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back?

Is this like why we invaded Iraq because the “alternative” was a world devastated by non-existent WMDs?

Is this like needing to drill holes in peoples’ heads to let the demons out because the “alternative” was Satan possessing them and bringing about the Apocalypse?

I mean, if non-true things constitute viable “alternatives” that justify any action, I should be able to walk into stores and take anything I want because the “alternative” is an angry Giant Magic Monkey-Tiger-Godzilla Robot will destroy the planet unless I’m allowed free foods and goods.

Of course, there’s no logic here.  Just a reminder that any delusion is acceptable as long as it sticks within the rules that Black life doesn’t matter and how dare anyone expect it to.

6/19/12

stfuconfederates:

This morning, several screenshots and reblogs of this post started flooding my dash (and a lot of yours too. A post in which David Karp, the founder and CEO of Tumblr, asked whether or not it was ok to say the n word whilst actually saying the n word. This post was dated 2010.

This sparked what will not be the last in a series of conversations about exactly how little this networking site and its creator care at all about People of Color and, in this instance and many others, Black people specifically. That post was old, but there have been much more recent events to add to this issue.

Namely, both Dion and Riley (among other Black and PoC bloggers I follow) have received emails from Tumblr staff which threaten to shut down their blogs for hate speech, when said ‘hate speech’ has always been in direct self-defense of anon-and-off bloggers who’ve been aggressively racist toward them, often using the same slur in Mr. Karp’s post above.

But Tumblr staff and David Karp don’t actually give a fuck about hate speech. They’ve made this perfectly clear time and time again by responding with ‘freedom of speech’ to distress calls from People of Color who are experiencing direct, abrasive, stalkerish racism from white Tumblr users, and then by threatening to shut down those same victimized bloggers for defending themselves.

And about that freedom of speech thing. Here’s a screencap of the very first section of Tumblr’s community guideline policy.

Tumblr staff knows very well that this is a private forum and that freedom of speech does not apply when that speech is defined as malicious bigotry. The staff knows that they have every right (and responsibility) to remove posts or blogs with anti-queer, anti-trans, ableist, and rasist content (especially when they directly target another blogger). However, Tumblr staff also seems to be living on a post-racial internet where racism is impossible. Unless, of course, you’re being ‘racist’ toward a white person.

So, in this toxic environment where People of Color have been continually subjected to racial slurs, hate speech, death threats, rape threats, stalking, dehumanization and dismissal-while being given no opportunity to defend themselves without further threatening from Tumblr staff itself-a number of bloggers packed up today and moved on to other sites. No blogs were deleted by Tumblr, but a few folks didn’t feel like sitting around and waiting for that to happen.

I hope to keep in touch with the people who’ve left, and I hope that these other networking sites treat them well. I hope that the founders and CEOs of those sites don’t vomit ‘freedom of speech’ in their faces and then threaten to silence them for defending themselves when and if they are subject to violent, unprovoked attacks of racial hatred. And I will do what I can when I can to watch closely what happens here, because I’ll be staying. This is where I collect.

Protect yourselves and the people you love.

-Austin